Pages tagged "unions"

A century ago, the Nordic countries were in such bad shape that masses of their people emigrated to the United States and Canada. Scandinavians had extreme inequality, major poverty, and faux democracies run by their economic elites.

Today, they are at the top of the international charts, playing tag with each other for “firsts” in individual freedom, income equality, shared abundance, and real democracy. Fierce class struggle made the difference. In the 1920s and 1930s, Swedes and Norwegians pushed their 1 percent out of dominance to invent what economists call “the Nordic model.”

The only things that stand between the privatization movement and its destruction of public education are teachers’ unions.

For the past three decades, a well-organized and wealthy alliance has created a false narrative about the “failure” of public schools and the necessity of turning children over to privately managed schools, private schools, religious schools, and even cyber schools. Their stated goal is “school choice,” but their true goal is to redirect public funding to private hands. As Rupert Murdoch memorably said, the $500 billion public education market is a market ripe for entrepreneurs.

What is a union? Put simply, it’s a collection of workers who decide they have a common interest, an interest that is in conflict with their boss.

More precisely, it is the organization those workers form so that they can negotiate with their boss collectively, instead of individually, over the terms of their employment. They do so by threatening to disrupt their boss’s accumulation of profit, by withholding their labor. But their power goes beyond just one workplace and one employer. Unions are the only enduring institutions in the United States that are dedicated to being run by and for the working class—through pooling of dues money—to advance their class interests in the economy and in the formal political arena.

In an impressive and important new book, David Bacon effectively counters the racism and xenophobia advanced by our current president and promoted in right-wing media by providing hundreds of photos and clear descriptions of the real life and work of the immigrants harvesting the food we eat.

Bacon does so by interviewing farmworkers and photographing farmworkers in their “housing” and in their work. He reports and records the humanity of the thousands of people who come north to harvest our crops and to feed their families as best they can.

After immigrating from China, Lynn Wang’s parents lived in the United States for three decades without encountering discrimination or racial abuse, until the final months of the 2016 presidential campaign.

“My mom was leaving yoga, and a woman from our hometown just pulled up next to her, leaned out of her car and started calling her racial slurs,” said Wang, a student at the University of Southern California. “We’ve been in Manhattan Beach for decades and never had that kind of thing happen before.”

Obama Administration negotiators have announced an "agreement in principle" for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). It is not final. It may not pass Congress.

The TPP is still secret and according to the terms in this year's fast-track legislation it will remain secret for 30 days after the president formally notifies Congress that he will sign it. That could be a while still, as the agreement's details need to be "ironed out." After that 30-day wait the full text has to be public for 60 days before Congress can vote. Expect a massive and massively funded corporate PR push.

By Paul Garver

Throughout the spring, liberal Democrats and some Tea Party Republicans, aided by a coalition of labor, environmental, and progressive groups, joined forces against a massive corporate power grab known as “Fast Track” Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) only to see it narrowly pass the House by a 218-208 vote in early June. TPA and the accompanying Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) bills were signed into law by President Barack Obama on June 29.

No, the acronym ISDS does not refer to the Islamic State (ISIS) -- though ISDS may pose an equally grave menace to the world in the long run.

ISDS stands for Investor-State Dispute Settlement. Thanks to the recent WikiLeaks publication of the classified draft Investment Chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (to have been kept secret for four years after the entry into force of the TPP agreement), we know that the ISDS is to be the unaccountable supranational court for multinational corporations to sue sovereign governments and obtain taxpayer compensation to recover the alleged loss of “expected future profits.”

Consideration of the status and the changing structures and organizing strategies of the U.S. labor movement is an important element in developing a new strategy for rebuilding the democratic left.

DSA Honorary Chair Harold Meyerson has written an important long-form piece on current developments in the U.S. Labor movement for The American Prospect. Below are excerpts and a link to the full article. -- Editors

A growing share of the organizing in labor today is already taking place outside the structures of collective bargaining. Unions are organizing domestic workers, who have no common employer. They are organizing taxi drivers, who are self-employed. The AFL-CIO’s major organizing effort, Working America, is a community-based campaign that until recently hadn’t dealt with its members’ workplace concerns or had a presence in those workplaces. And in the fight to raise Seattle’s minimum wage to $15, even though few if any of the beneficiaries were or would become union members, Rolf ended up bargaining with employers on behalf of the city’s entire working class.

To say that poverty is a women’s issue is an understatement. Nearly 25% of full-time jobs in the U.S. do not pay well enough to lift a family out of poverty, and 66% of those jobs are done primarily by women. In addition, the changing nature of work and increased categorization of workers as temporary or independent contractors hits women hard. Women in low-wage work are disproportionately adult women of color who are caring for children without aid from a partner. Very few have paid sick days, any sort of retirement plan, or even consistent workplace safety regulation.

Join Steve Max, a founder of the legendary community organizing school, the Midwest Academy, to practice talking about socialism in plain language. Create your own short rap. Use your personal experience and story to explain democratic socialism. Prepare for those conversations about socialism that happen when you table or canvass. This workshop is for those who have already had an introduction to democratic socialism, whether from DSA's webinar or from other sources. Questions? Contact Theresa Alt <talt@igc.org> 607-280-7649.

DSA was concerned to find out that the company that provides our website and online organizing infrastructure, NationBuilder, had as a client the Trump campaign and other right-wing candidates. Progressives built this kind of infrastructure and tools for digital organizing and we have now lost that organizing edge. We are moving to identify other options for a CMS/CRM. As an under-resourced, member funded organization, this move will take time for us to carry out, but it is an important statement for us to make.